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Aether – Free, privacy-sensitive public communities

getaether.net

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Re: Aether – Free, privacy-sensitive public communities

#211

Post by balladeer »

TekMol wrote: post #56
rolleiflex wrote: post #47

Hey guys - Burak here. Ouch, this was supposed to be a ‘soft’ launch. I’m here to answer any questions as usual. I’ll pick the best and try to add it to the FAQ on the site.

Looks good. But a native application? I would only install a native application if it comes from a source that has a proven trackrecord of being trustworthy. Can you track how many people installed it, now that it is on HN? You say it puts everyone on "one single universe with the same content". So it should be easy to put up an instance that provides a web interface to the content, right? I would think that posting…

It's not a native application. It's an Electron app. By the way it doesn't ask for an elevated permission.

Re: Aether – Free, privacy-sensitive public communities

#212

Post by blackbrokkoli »

natch wrote: post #195
hannasanarion wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tyranny of the minority is worse

Hah. Perhaps. But that doesn't mean we should accept either.

How to prevent that tho? Everything seems to be at the risk of either the first or the second...

Re: Aether – Free, privacy-sensitive public communities

#213

Post by natch »

blackbrokkoli wrote: post #212
natch wrote: post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hah. Perhaps. But that doesn't mean we should accept either.

How to prevent that tho? Everything seems to be at the risk of either the first or the second...

Good question. The framers of the US Constitution attempted to do it with a system of checks and balances... which works to a certain extent, but not perfectly. Point is just because it’s hard, that’s no reason to give up trying.

Re: Aether – Free, privacy-sensitive public communities

#214

Post by natch »

SquishyPanda23 wrote: post #181
natch wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree with most of what you said, but we might be looking at it from different angles. Especially want to zero in on this: >I'd personally rather the people who are hostile to new ideas or critical thinking have their own communities A fact that you don't seem to have in your mind here is that often those people are the majority. So you'll have majorities voting in mods who are hostile to new ideas and critical thi…

I think your view here may be a little more pessimistic than mine. I don't think the majority is opposed to critical thinking, although I think most people are bad at it. I also think most people are bad at civil and effective communication, so you may get toxic communities even from well-meaning people. I'll be interested to see what happens. You may be right that communities will select mods that create echo chambe…

Yes you are optimistic.

Re: Aether – Free, privacy-sensitive public communities

#215

Post by rolleiflex »

comex wrote: post #169
rolleiflex wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks! > The FAQs say that the app is a p2p based app. What is the p2p protocol being used here? * How does it compare to libp2p, SSB, and others? * What's the security model, and how would the system mitigate Sybil attacks etc? It's built from scratch. It runs c0 subprotocol of Mim. You can see some basic comparisons here: https://getaether.net/docs/how_is_it_different_from/ Other questions - all good questions, bu…

> It runs c0 subprotocol of Mim. Can you elaborate? Googling these terms doesn't produce much other than a few papers using "MiM" to mean man-in-the-middle, as well as your comment itself!

I actually posted the protocol spec somewhere a few months ago, but it might have gotten taken down when I flipped the beta site into the production site.

Mim (comes from 'mime' from 'to replicate') is a HTTP based stateless protocol where the nodes communicate with each other via bog-standard HTTP GET and POST requests. The nodes can create caches for oft-requested data. c0 is a subprotocol of Mim that defines six graph objects, boards, threads, posts, userkeys, votes and truststates. the first four are obvious, the vote is a userkey > b|t|p relation, a trustste is a userkey > userkey relation. It creates a directed graph that is mostly acyclic.

It allows for efficient flood-network propagation of this graph based on time intervals, and it comes with certain patch semantics, so given a delta communicated from one node to another, there is always a way to apply that delta into the local node's graph in a way that does not create merge conflicts.

Re: Aether – Free, privacy-sensitive public communities

#216

Post by brokenmachine »

rolleiflex wrote: post #47

Hey guys - Burak here. Ouch, this was supposed to be a ‘soft’ launch. I’m here to answer any questions as usual. I’ll pick the best and try to add it to the FAQ on the site.

Is the proof-of-work likely to be too much for a mobile to be able to do? If a mobile client were to be made, that is.

Also, does the proof-of-work scale, eg how the bitcoin network gets harder and harder as the hashing power increases.

Re: Aether – Free, privacy-sensitive public communities

#217

Post by brokenmachine »

the_clarence wrote: post #193
nixarian wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You state that one of the purposes of this platform is to allow you the freedom to be wrong, but if people can save something before 6 months, how would you prevent someone from saving an embarrassing comment for future use against you? Or are you the only one capable of saving your own comments?

The 6 month thing is a storage problem where every node needs to store the app’s content. The privacy thing is free marketing that came out of that constraint. This is really a good marketing move tbh. Everybody wants privacy and nobody understands what it technically means.

The way I see it, it has some privacy. No node after the first hop will have any way to get ip information of the poster, or even know how many hops they are away from the poster.

Re: Aether – Free, privacy-sensitive public communities

#220

Post by brokenmachine »

SquishyPanda23 wrote: post #162
Kaveren wrote: post #157

> "Communities can elect and impeach their own mods by voting. If a mod behaves inappropriately, users can disable that mod locally as well." This sounds like it's definitely vulnerable to abuse. Democracy is nice, but I'm not sure it's a great idea in a situation like this where it's online with total anonymity and easy to vote fraudulently. > "Aether keeps a 6 months of content by default. It's gone after." I often…

> We should focus on changing society so it's not so critical of statements people made years ago when they changed as a person I'm a believer in progress long term, but I seriously doubt humanity is really capable of what you're describing in a way that's applied equally to all groups of people. It seems several orders of magnitude much easier for people to develop the habit of recording information they might need…

> It seems several orders of magnitude much easier for people to develop the habit of recording information they might need later.

6 months is fine for just social commentary and such, but it seems to me that a design like that effectively forces the community to be banal, because the community will not remember anything for any longer than that time.

Better if there was some mechanism by which the most-saved (upvoted?) posts are retained by the network as a whole for longer.

On, for example, Stackoverflow, most of the posts I've found useful have been more than 6 months old. 6 months is not such a long time unless we're talking about the latest pop culture hotness.

We are lucky Shakespeare didn't use a platform that forgets everything after 6 months.

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